William Jerdan (1782-1869) was for
more than three decades editor of the Literary Gazette, a weekly paper that
published or reviewed most writers working in the first half of the nineteenth
century. Jerdan began work on his four-volume Autobiography shortly after
his forced retirement in 1850, compiling what he anticipated would be valuable
information about the publishing trade and its more obscure denizens. Many of
Jerdan's friends were antiquaries and he writes like an antiquary himself,
producing a book rich in factual detail but impoverished in style and structure.
About a quarter of the whole is given to the author's life, another to his work,
and the remainder to “illustrations”—anecdotes, letters, poems,
and documents. These include a manuscript play by Thomas Hood, an aborted life of
the poet James Thomson, and a prospectus for the Royal Geographical Society.

Jerdan was born and raised in
Scotland, a younger son of a gentleman of but middling means. In 1806 he
established himself in London, working as a journalist, political reporter, and
miscellaneous writer. He contributed to The Satirist, a scandal-magazine
which he purchased in 1812, and was editor of The Sun, a Tory daily, until
he had a falling-out with the proprietor, John Taylor. In 1817 he became editor of
the recently-founded Literary Gazette, which under his direction became,
after the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, the dominant literary
journal of the 1820s. Through reviews in the Gazette readers formed their
first impressions of new publications, making the journal of some consequence to
authors and publishers who sometimes assailed its editor with bribes or threats.
After 1830 the Gazette lost ground to a rival weekly, The
Athenæum, but continued to be influential.

The 1820s were Jerdan's years of
glory and take up most of his autobiography. He credits himself with launching the
careers of the poets Bryan Waller Procter and L.E.L. and the novelists Bulwer
Lytton and W. H. Ainsworth; William Maginn, Lady Blessington, and many lesser
lights first appeared before the public in his pages. Jerdan purchased a mansion,
Grove House, and became a man about town: in addition to his literary associations
he was patronized by George Canning and had other political contacts in William
Gifford and John Murray; he belonged to social clubs and learned societies, several
of which he was instrumental in founding. But he was living beyond his means, and
in 1834 lost nearly all to creditors. The Autobiography passes lightly over
the dark days that followed and concludes with an account of how Jerdan was rescued
in 1850 by his former friends and associates.

Perhaps not many have read the
four-volume Autobiography from stem to stern—a work that in scale and
substance recalls Richardson's Clarissa. The protagonist pours over his old
correspondence, reflecting on choices made and taking stock of his moral virtues
and failings. Later volumes respond to what reviewers were saying about the earlier
volumes, affording the author opportunities to insist that he did have a
plan for his sprawling work and that in any event that it is his life and he
would tell it as he pleased. If the design tends to get lost in a welter of
digression, there is a novelistic component nonetheless: the crash and redemption
in the fourth volume are carefully prepared for, and if not so moving as the
parallel events in Lockhart's Life of Scott it is only because William
Jerdan was a less compelling figure.

We are told at the outset that his
begetting sin was pride, a judgment borne out by events but also mitigated by
circumstances. Jerdan shows us how he was bombarded by interested flatterers,
though one cannot help but notice that the praise was usually offered up by
second-raters and not the haughty spirits of his age. It is a moot point whether he
was shaping taste or being shaped by it. If the reputations established by his
journal did not last, the Literary Gazette and the Autobiography
remain valuable for recording what was thought at the time as opposed to what
history has chosen to remember. In the end it was Jerdan's services to literature
more than his reputation as a writer or critic that proved his salvation.

Jerdan is candid about the
publishing business but not about his domestic life. He was twice married but
barely mentions the first marriage and says nothing of the second. Such silence was
customary, but in Jerdan's case it amounts to concealment. In a London Review of
Books essay of 21 September 2000 Cynthia Lawford demonstrated that rumors
of an affair with Letitia Elizabeth Landon were not only true, but that L.E.L. had
three children by Jerdan. It is apparent from the Autobiography her advent
was a turning point in his life and the fortunes of the Literary Gazette;
when he writes that he is emotionally incapable of discussing her death one is
inclined to believe him. Jerdan was left with three families to support, no small
task for a nineteenth-century journalist. Of this he says nothing.

His relationship with Byron is
much less central to the narrative but also of interest. We learn (in volume four)
that they had been neighbors in 1807-08 when Byron had been staying in London, and
that Byron's dog had trampled Jerdan's garden. Perhaps it was that, or politics, or
dandyism that set Jerdan off, but whatever it was, he was among the very first to
take a pop at the poet, writing in The Satirist. Jerdan was among the select
few to whom Byron sent a challenge, provoked by comments on his marriage and
subsequent separation printed in The Sun. Douglas Kinnaird, a mutual friend,
succeeded in quashing the matter. Jerdan also managed to get on the wrong side of
Walter Scott, becoming one of the few to be refused an invitation to Abbotsford.
All this he is willing to tell us.

With the exception of those from
L.E.L. and a few others, the 250 letters reprinted in the Autobiography
consist chiefly of business notes. They indicate how the publishing system worked
by exchanging information, compliments, gifts, visits, and the occasional threat.
The letters illustrate how much Jerdan, who like most professional writers
struggled with the need to produce oceans of text on tight deadlines, valued the
occasional relaxation of a country-house visit. They show how business was
conducted in the various learned and charitable societies that consumed so much of
his attention—Jerdan was generous with time, talent, and money, striving to
do what he could for the struggling writers whose lives he would later chronicle.

Some fairly innocent comments
about John Wolcot (Peter Pindar) in the first volume provoked a testy response from
Cyrus Redding, and perhaps for that reason Jerdan is more reticent than he might
otherwise have been in writing about others, even when long dead. Perhaps too a
fear that the truth might come out about his relationship with L.E.L. dissuaded him
from reflecting on the behavior of his contemporaries. Certainly he knew more than
he is willing to tell and is quick to forgive the few failings in others he does
mention. That William Jerdan had an edge to his character is apparent from his
early work at The Satirist, his lifelong fondness for epigrams, and various
quarrels and personal resentments. But in the Autobiography he strives to be
on his best behavior and his pen-portraits suffer accordingly. As if in
compensation, he is more specific and illuminating about money than his
contemporaries were wont to be.

The Autobiography is
perhaps most valuable for what it reveals about the personal and institutional
connections operating behind the scenes in literary London. Jerdan's
friends—he describes hundreds of people as friends—worked in the
Foreign Office, the Post Office, the Records Office, and the Admiralty; they were
lawyers, physicians, politicians, country squires, explorers, peers, and wealthy
industrialists; they were writers, painters, printers, architects, and engineers.
What they all had in common was an interest in literature; if not writers
themselves (many were, at least in small ways), they served the interests of
writers by providing information, serving on boards, and supplying work and
patronage. More than anything else, it was Jerdan's desire to document this strong
if ephemeral social infrastructure that accounts for the distended form of his
book.